RNA-Seq of Bacteria

Although the pioneering study was done with eukaryotic organisms, RNA sequencing technology has more recently been applied to prokaryotes, mainly bacteria.

Even today, after many years of studies of bacteria, new discoveries continue to sur­prise us. Through RNA-seq, it can be seen how the microbial transcriptome is more complex than initially thought and how it approximates that of eukaryotes in various aspects. Perhaps it is because of this transcriptomic versatility that bacteria are able to adapt to diverse environ­ments with such agility.

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What is RNA-Seq?

long RNAs are first converted into a library of cDNA fragments through either RNA fragmentation or DNA fragmentation. Sequencing adaptors (blue) are subsequently added to each cDNA fragment and a short sequence is obtained from each cDNA using high-throughput sequencing technology. The resulting sequence reads are aligned with the reference genome or transcriptome, and classified as three types: exonic reads, junction reads and poly(A) end-reads. These three types are used to generate a base-resolution expression profile for each gene. Nat Rev Genet 10(1):57-63 (2009)